Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security

Terrorism, Philosophical and Ideological Origins

█ ERIC v.d. LUFT

Terrorism is the systematic belief in the political, religious, or
ideological efficacy of producing fear by attacking—or threatening
to attack—unsuspecting or defenseless populations, usually
civilians, and usually by surprise. Terrorist attacks are desperate acts
of those who feel themselves to be otherwise powerless. Terrorism is
self-righteous, absolutist, and exclusivist. In general, terrorist policy
adherents are unwilling or unable to negotiate with their perceived
enemies, or prevented by political, social, or economic circumstances from
doing so. The philosophical underpinnings of terrorism have become well
established worldwide.

The terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" came
into the language in the 1790s when British journalists, politicians,
orators, and historians used them to describe the Jacobins and other
particularly violent French revolutionaries. The terms have evolved since
then, and now typically refer to furtive acts by unknown, underground
perpetrators, not overt acts by people in power. Nevertheless, some
terrorists are secretly harbored, underwritten, trained, or commanded by
states that have vested interests against the terrorists' targets.
Examples of state-sponsored terrorism include Afghanistan's support
of al-Qaeda in 2001, Libya's involvement in the destruction of Pan
Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and Adolf Hitler
(1889–1945) ordering the Reichstag burned down in 1933 so that he
could blame the Communists.

Terrorism as we now understand it was not possible until the invention of
gunpowder and subsequent explosives and incendiaries. Before that, small
cadres of insignificant conspirators generally lacked the means to achieve
sudden massive destruction by stealth. Gunpowder enabled weaklings to
outmatch and regularly defeat strong warriors for the first time in
history. In a historical sense, modern terrorism began with the unrealized
November 5, 1605 "Gunpowder Plot" of Guy Fawkes
(1570–1606), who, had he lived in the twelfth century, could not
have threatened king and parliament as he did in the seventeenth. But even
with the ever-widening proliferation and availability of explosives since
then, acts of terrorism remained rare until the middle of the nineteenth
century, when anarchism arose as an ideological force.

The systematic theory of modern political terrorism arose in Germany
during the
Vormä
, i.e., the time between the accession of Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm
IV (1795–1861) in 1840 and the revolutions of 1848. Edgar Bauer
(1820–1886) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), two of the
three principal anarchists in the "Young Hegelians," were
among terrorism's earliest ideological proponents. The Young
Hegelians were a loosely organized group of radical intellectuals
influenced to various degrees by the dialectical logic of Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1771–1830), the dominant German philosopher of the
first half of the nineteenth century. Hegel could not have foreseen that
his thought would be perverted in this way and would not have approved of
terrorism in any form.

Almost every ideology that became important in the twentieth century arose
from the Young Hegelians. These second-generation disciples of Hegel
ramified his allegedly self-unifying thought into many disparate
movements: socialism and communism came from Karl Marx (1818–1883)
and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), socialism and Zionism from Moses
Hess (1812–1875), secular humanism from Ludwig Feuerbach
(1804–1872), the "higher criticism" of sacred texts
from David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) and Bruno Bauer
(1809–1882), dialectical historicism from August von Cieszkowski
(1814–1894), political liberalism from Arnold Ruge
(1802–1880), existentialism and anthropological materialism from
Karl Schmidt (1819–1864), individualistic anarchism from Max
Stirner (1806–1856), utopian anarchism from Bakunin, and raw
anarchism and political terrorism from Edgar Bauer.

In chronological order of their earliest terrorist writings, the first six
major theorists of terrorism were Edgar Bauer, Bakunin, Wilhelm Weitling
(1808–1871), Karl Heinzen (1809–1880), Sergei Nechaev
(1847–1882), and Johann Most (1846–1906).

Edgar Bauer became involved with radical groups in 1839 while a student at
the University of Berlin. By 1842 both he and his close friend Engels were
members of "The Free Ones" (
Die Freien
), the most notorious club of intellectual agitators in Germany in the
early 1840s. His first book,
Bruno Bauer and his Enemies
(1842), defended his brother against government persecution, urged
violence, and threatened the Prussian regime with a return to the French
Revolution. His 1843 polemic,
Critique's Struggle with Church and State
, advocated terrorism even more blatantly and earned him a prison
sentence.

Bakunin, a Russian noble by birth, studied Hegelianism in Russia from 1836
to 1840 and in Berlin from 1841 to

The body of a victim lays covered on the ground at the scene of a bus
bomb, background, after a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated
nail-studded explosives on the bus in the northern Israeli port city
of Haifa in December 2001.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

.

1842. In October 1842, under the pseudonym Jules Elysard, he published
"Reaction in Germany," a revolutionary article in
Ruge's
Deutsche Jahrbücher
. This essay recommended insurgent violence with lines such as:
"The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." Bakunin soon
distanced himself from Young Hegelianism, but retained his mutinous
attitude toward church and state. His extreme anarchism and nihilism were
best expressed in
God and the State
, written in 1871 but published posthumously in 1882.

Weitling was a German tailor who became politically active in 1843. He
wrote letters, broadsides, tracts, pamphlets, and books inciting the
proletariat to all sorts of violent crimes to free themselves from their
oppressors. Even firebrands among the communist, socialist, anarcharist,
or syndicalist movements who advocated guerrilla tactics to achieve their
political goals were appalled by Weitling's 1843 suggestion that
revolutionaries could use arson, theft, and murder to their advantage.

Heinzen is sometimes regarded as the ideological father of modern
terrorism, despite the prior writings of Edgar Bauer, Bakunin, and
Weitling. Heinzen wrote in 1848 and published in 1849 a powerful essay,
"Murder," which claimed that not only the assassinations of
leaders, but even the mass murders of innocent civilians, could be
effective political tools and should be used without regret. He fled
Germany in 1849 and immigrated to America as a "48er," a
refugee from the 1848 revolutions. He edited German-language newspapers,
notably
Der Pionier
, in several American cities. Although he never specifically recanted his
terrorist beliefs, he became a relatively peaceful socialist. He and his
wife lived the last twenty years of his life in Roxbury, Massachusetts, as
tenants and friends of a prominent early woman physician, Marie Zakrzewska
(1829–1902), one of
Der Pionier
's most ardent supporters.

Nechaev, the son of a former Russian serf, learned early to hate
government in general and the czarist regime in particular. As a student
at the University of St. Petersburg in 1868, his radical agitations soon
forced him into exile. He met Bakunin in Geneva, Switzerland, in March
1869, and became briefly his disciple. They co-wrote several inflammatory
pamphlets, including
The Revolutionist's Catechism
(1869), an unrestrained exhortation to anti-government violence, urging
relentless cruelty toward all enemies of the revolution and absolute
devotion to the cause of destroying the civilized world. Nechaev returned
to Russia in August 1869, murdered a political rival named Ivanov in
December 1869, and fled back to Geneva. The Swiss extradited him to Russia
in 1872. Convicted of murder in 1873 and sentenced to twenty years of hard
labor in Siberia, he died in prison under mysterious circumstances. Fedor
Dostoevskii (1821–1881) based his character Pyotr Verkhovensky in
The Possessed
(1871) on Nechaev.

Most was a Social Democrat member of the Reichstag who was forced to flee
Germany during Otto von Bismarck's (1815–1898) "Red
Scare" of 1878. In exile Most became more radical, relinquished
Marxism for anarchism, and edited an inflammatory newspaper,
Die Freiheit
, first in London, briefly in Switzerland, and after 1882 in America.
Embittered after serving eighteen months of hard labor in a British prison
and after the German Social Democrat Party expelled him
in absentia
, his motto became "Long live hate!" He fell in love with
dynamite and spent the rest of his career praising it, learning how to use
it, and teaching his fellow revolutionaries how to steal it and the money
needed to buy it. He probably invented the letter-bomb, though there is no
evidence that he ever used one himself. American agents arrested him for
sedition in 1901 because
Die Freiheit
quoted Heinzen's line, "Murder the murderers," the
same day that anarchist Leon Czolgosz (1873–1901) killed President
William McKinley (1843–1901).

█ FURTHER READING:

BOOKS:

Breckman, Warren.
Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory:
Dethroning the Self.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Browning, Gary K.
Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy.
London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1999.

Confronting Fear: A History of Terrorism
, edited by Isaac Cronin. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2002.

Laqueur, Walter.
A History of Terrorism.
New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002.

Luft, Eric v.d. "Edgar Bauer and the Origins of the Theory of
Terrorism,"
The Left-Hegelians: New Philosophical and Political Perspectives
, edited by Douglas Moggach and Andrew Chitty. Albany: SUNY Press,
forthcoming.

Mah, Harold.
The End of Philosophy, the Origin of "Ideology": Karl Marx
and the Crisis of the Young Hegelians.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.